Cannon Beach at Sunset

New Journal 42 – Cannon Beach


My feet were cold. Despite the warm weather to be had in Portland, Cannon beach had a distinctive chill to it. I’d been wading in and out of the ocean for about 45 minutes.  The conditions weren’t exactly Arctic but all I could feel was a constant pins and needles sensation.

Having the camera in front of me, as usual, acted as a mental shield to the elements. It wasn’t until later when I wandered back to Rachel on the beach that I would start to get the feeling/pain back in my feet.

There are certain challenges all travelling photographers have to face. For me, the worst, besides from miserable weather, is when you’ve found your destination but you fail to find a composition that excites you. As Rachel sat reading her Kindle on the sand, I went from frustration to frustration looking for a composition before golden hour began.

If I come away from a shoot with two great images, that’s an amazing day. I’m usually happy with one. In the past, I’d come home with hundreds of photos and I’d consider the majority of them good enough. It’s not that I’ve become a worse photographer, I’m just much fussier about what images I’m willing to publish.

I was searching for one good image. After settling on 3 compositions that I’d shoot during sunset and blue hour, I strolled back to Rachel in time for a picnic. This is a great part of our lifestyle – we’ve had picnics in front of some of the most incredible scenes this world has to offer.

The period between scouting shots and golden hour can be anything from 20 minutes to 3 hours. This time it was short. Before I knew it I was back arranging the tripod and taking pictures.

In 1 hour I took about 20 shots. I was reasonably pleased with 2 of them, one of which you see today. Then we hit the road after 10pm for the 1.5 hour drive back to Portland. Driving back I wondered if I could call this a productive day; a question I often ask myself.

Time will tell, I guess.

Today’s Photo – Cannon beach at sunset

The image, as you can see, has a band of fog at the bottom of some of the rocks. I added this in post-processing using Nik’s Color Efex Fog filter. However, I used a soft brush at a low opacity to gently paint the fog in so it wasn’t too over-the-top.

Since I used a brighter exposure for the bottom half of the image, I had to add a colour filter in photoshop to add colour to the otherwise white water. Sometimes I don’t mind white, smoky water but in this scene it looked out of place.

Before the Joys of Post-Processing